Open Measures 2024 Roundup
Get caught up on the Open Measures year in review
While Katie Ledecky was bringing home gold after gold, Red Wine Supernova and GNX were on repeat, and the New York Yankees were breaking our hearts in the World Series, here’s what the Open Measures team got up to over the last year…
Product Launches and Datasets
The Open Measures engineering team was hard at work in 2024 churning out new features, products, and datasets. One of our earliest projects culminated in the release of two new decentralized datasets, Bluesky and Fediverse. With the explosive growth of Bluesky over the last few months, we’re excited to be on the cutting edge of social media research as online behavior continues to evolve.
Later, we launched a refreshed Public App interface and feature set, including new Boolean and Advanced options to enhance search functionality. Elsewhere, we introduced our Media App to enable multi-modal research, adding video, image, and audio files to the Enterprise platform. In April, we introduced our Crawl Requests App which made our platform one of the most flexible research tools available.
Here’s to many more exciting product releases in 2025!
On to research…
US Politics and the Presidential Election
Throughout the year, our research team examined different aspects of the US Presidential Election and, more broadly, the US political arena.
In April, we looked into how the controversial policy proposals encompassed in Project 2025 were received on Gettr and Scored (a platform we also individually profiled), and recorded how the conversation around Project 2025 grew admidst confusion.
Later, we looked at the proliferation of racist and misogynistic narratives and disinformation in Michigan in the run-up to the November election.
We hope our electoral research can serve as a blueprint and inspiration for future work investigating elections worldwide, including upcoming federal/presidential elections in 2025 throughout Subsaharan Africa, Western Europe, Canada, and South America.
International News and Regional Conflicts
Like other mainstream social media platforms, alt-tech platforms play host to a number of conversations about worldwide geopolitical happenings. Conversation about the death of Alexei Navalny showed how effective Donald Trump is at shaping trends on Truth Social.
An investigation into the way people were talking about the conflict between Israel and Iran on Telegram revealed both antisemitism and Islamophobia. Later, Open Measures co-founder Juni Bevensee concluded a ten month investigation looking into how extremist Israeli settlers use social media to circumnavigate international sanctions by using non profits to fundraise for weapons.
In June, we collaborated with our partners at Code for Africa on a deep dive investigation looking into Russian propaganda channels on Telegram that targeted UN peacekeepers in the Sahel.
New Themes
We’re always developing, and iterating on, new research themes using our platform:
This year, we dove into the shockingly public world of the Yahoo Boys, a primarily West Africa-based network of romance scammers, many of whom operate on Telegram. Also on Telegram, we found a worldwide ‘decentralized’ network of Active Club members that used the platform to communicate and socialize among chapters.
We also worked with our friends at NYU to look into how harassment on Kiwi Farms goes unchecked and can lead to a swift escalation of abuse.
Looking Ahead
We hope you have enjoyed our product and research output in 2024; know that this is just the start and we can’t wait to continue our work in 2025. If you have any feature requests for our platform, are interested in collaborating on research, or have ideas you think would be exciting for us to explore further, never hesitate to reach out.
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Identify disinformation and extremism with the Open Measures platform.
Organizations use Open Measures’ tooling every day to track trends related to networks of influence, coordinated harassment campaigns, and state-backed info ops.